Firewood at 105% of Capacity

[kevin_standlee]

This morning, Lisa hitched up the utility trailer to the Small Orange Pickup and we went over to Big R shortly after they opened at 7 AM and collected what we hope will be the final pallet of Pres-to-Logs this season. This pallet was not in the best of shape, and despite Lisa being very cautious on the slow drive home, things didn't go that well.



It's hard to see in this shot, but the pallet collapsed. There were already signs that the plastic wrap may have leaked, so our initial plan to put off unloading until tomorrow had to be scrapped.

Lisa climbed up into the bed of the trailer and gingerly started pulling logs out and handing them to me two at a time. As there are 390 logs on a pallet, this took a while. Surprisingly, it only took us a bit more than an hour, though, even though there were a fair number of broken logs, and unfortunately way too much sawdust, which is what you get when the logs dissolve.



However, we did get the large wood box completely full for the first time in several years

Measuring only based on the large wood box, we are now at 105% of capacity on firewood, as the small box on the front porch and the ready supply of up to 24 logs in the living room were also full. We pulled the pallets out of the trailer for later reduction to kindling (the pallets are untreated wood, so we consider them safe to burn), I put the plastic wrap into the trash, and Lisa put the trailer and pickup away. She then went to bed, having been up all night working on a project. I'll see her again in the wee hours of Sunday morning as we plan to go grocery shopping.

I was very glad to get all of that wood put away, as the wind came up this afternoon, and it looks like it might rain. I would have been very annoyed to have spent all that money on firewood only to have it make like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Comments

[jonesnori]

Is the sawdust at all usable, even though inconvenient, or do you have to just discard it?

[kevin_standlee]

If you can keep it from getting contaminated by dirt or water, you can sometimes burn it. We ended up with one bucket of mostly-usable sawdust, which I periodically shoveled into the fireplace yesterday. It was perhaps about the equivalent of three or four Pres-to-Logs. You just had to shovel sawdust more often than you would put logs into the fireplace.